Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America by Jean M Hartman John Lewis

Author:Jean M Hartman, John Lewis [Jean M Hartman, John Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, General, Political Science
ISBN: 9781315291550
Google: eJsYDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16T16:18:45+00:00

Commentaries

Operating Most Effectively Under the Current System

Ellen Malcolm

Jamin Raskin and I agree that the best prescription for the current campaign finance system is public financing. Though I believe that federal campaigns will ultimately be funded publicly, that isn't going to happen soon. The Republican majority in Congress is adamantly opposed to most campaign finance reform, especially public financing; Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott is often quoted as calling public financing "food stamps for politicians."

The challenge for EMILY's List and other groups working on behalf of nontraditional candidates is to be effective in the current system or in a future "reformed" system that is not publicly financed.

Raskin correctly points out the critical problem for women and minority candidates is that they rarely receive support from traditional political funders. Any partial reform that does not replace private contributions with public funds will always be dominated by special interest money. After all, economic interests have tremendous incentive and ability to participate in the election system.

The key to electing women and minorities is to encourage the participation of small contributors, the foundation of nontraditional candidates' campaigns. EMILY's List has done that by creating a donor network.

Our members pay $100 to join EMILY's List and agree to contribute $100 or more to two candidates during a two-year election cycle. We send our members profiles of pro-choice Democratic women who are running viable campaigns for House, Senate, and governor. The members decide whom to support and write checks directly to the candidates. EMILY's List gathers the contributions and sends them on to the campaigns.

A case study of how our small donor network can be effective can be seen in the 1992 campaign of Eva Clayton in North Carolina's 1st congressional district. Clayton was a county commissioner running in a newly created, majority African-American district that took up twenty-seven counties in the northeastern part of the state. Her own county had a population of 9,000. The frontrunner was the son of the congressman who had held the seat for thirty-five years. Clayton had the experience and a grassroots network. What she didn't have was support from the traditional political donors in North Carolina or Washington, DC.

EMILY's List recommended Clayton to our members and raised more than $30,000 from contributors across the country, most of whom would never have heard of her candidacy. She won her primary and beat the congressman's son in a runoff. She was elected president of the 1992 Democratic congressional class, the first woman and first African American ever to hold that position.

Since real, fundamental reform does not seem to be a current option, we must hope that partial reform will work. However, we have compelling evidence that partial reform does not work at all for women.

EMILY's List was formed in 1985, a decade after the last major Common Cause-backed reform had gone into effect. In ten years that reform had not helped women. In fact, the number of Democratic women in the House had actually declined from fourteen to twelve, and not one Democratic woman had been elected to the Senate in her own right.

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